Maybe the Monkey Needs a Sports Star’s Name

‘Animal Practice’ and ‘The Neighbors,’ TV Comedies

Justin Kirk as a veterinarian, with Crystal, in the new NBC comedy series “Animal Practice.”Credit
Neil Jacobs/NBC

There’s only an hour on Wednesday night between the end of “Animal Practice” on NBC and the start of “The Neighbors” on ABC. That may not be enough time for you to recover from the brain cell loss the first one induced and prepare yourself for the even more severe brain cell loss the second will cause.

These are both shows that traffic in the kind of lowbrow comedy that actually makes you stupider. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re unwatchable. Every year some comedies — “Last Man Standing” and “Suburgatory” in 2011, for instance — prove there’s an audience for junk food. But these two shows are particularly junky, not merely relying on lowest-common-denominator humor but doing it clumsily.

“Animal Practice,” first seen in a sneak-peak premiere during the Olympics last month and now taking a regular slot, presents what it hopes are the wacky high jinks at a New York animal hospital. In comedy, though, there’s a fine line between wacky and desperate. “Animal Practice” crosses it early and often.

The pilot established the not-very-creative foundation that the hospital, presided over by an unorthodox veterinarian named George (Justin Kirk), has just been inherited by Dorothy, George’s former love interest. She is played charmingly by JoAnna Garcia Swisher, but the surrounding hubbub is more annoying than amusing.

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Excerpt: ‘Animal Practice’

Apparently Amos and Andy weren’t available, so the role of offensive racial stereotype fell to an Asian-American actor, as it does far too often these days. It’s Bobby Lee, playing a whining, buffoonish veterinarian named Yamamoto, who in the pilot finds himself wrapped in a python. It would have been to Mr. Lee’s and the series’s advantage if the python had turned Yamamoto into a meal, but unfortunately the character appears destined to be a regular.

A monkey named Rizzo (Crystal) is also a regular, presumably because someone had the mistaken impression that a lifeless scene could be made funny by having a monkey wander through it. Rizzo, who might also make a tasty python meal, gives the show a cat video feel: the mere presence of an animal in your footage guarantees a certain number of hits.

“The Neighbors,” too, thuds awkwardly in its first two episodes. It’s “3rd Rock From the Sun” without the wit or the understatement. And without the fabulous cast, though here Jami Gertz is a reliable anchor, serving the same wisecracking-spouse function that she did in the underrated “Still Standing.”

She plays Debbie, who moves with her husband, Marty (Lenny Venito), and three ill-behaved children to a New Jersey subdivision that until the family’s arrival had been inhabited entirely by space aliens posing awkwardly as humans. The aliens have all named themselves after professional athletes — a bit that stays surprisingly funny, at least through the first two episodes — and are led by a couple who seem to have learned their dynamics from 1950s sitcoms, Larry Bird (Simon Templeman) and Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye).

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Excerpt: ‘The Neighbors’

Every minute of this show seems to be announcing aggressively that it’s not “3rd Rock.” John Lithgow’s family of space aliens in that series had assimilated enough to be able to pass as human; part of what made the show funny was the contrast between the intelligence of Mr. Lithgow’s college professor character and his continuing struggles to grasp the nuances of humanness.

The extraterrestrials here, though, haven’t yet passed Being Human 101. Their speech and movements are stilted, a quality that too often transfers to the jokes. When Debbie and Marty arrive, every resident of the development brings them the same welcoming gift, a pie, simultaneously. Larry and Jackie call their children “loin fruit.” And so on. “3rd Rock” episodes have aged pretty well. “Coneheads” skits haven’t.

Weirdly, though, it’s the dumber of the two series, “The Neighbors,” that gives its idiotic characters at least a chance of becoming endearing.

In the first two episodes the writers take a stab at using extraterrestrial naïveté for something other than cheap gags. It’s not terribly effective, but maybe they’ll grow better at it in the unlikely event that viewers get past the initial shock of how out of phase this series feels and let it run for a while.

“Animal Practice,” in contrast, seems likely to get more annoying the longer you watch it.

In any case, if you do try to brave the brain cell die-off and take in both of these shows this week, be forewarned: Next week “The Neighbors” moves an hour earlier, so the two will be back-to-back. No recovery time.

A version of this review appears in print on September 26, 2012, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Maybe the Monkey Needs a Sports Star’s Name. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe